Our Meister Eckhart has a dazzling use of words.  Even in translation, his expressions grip the mind drawing it from the text to the Holy Ground within the soul.

We scatter ourselves and get sold into multiplicity.

Is this not the truth beloved?   We are undone by a busyness of spirit, not just a magnitude of demanding tasks.  The tyranny of the immediate requires our submission.  It’s hard to defeat an enemy you secretly admire.

Eckhart does not consider that it is easy to acquire the state of passivity he describes. He says elsewhere that it is rare for anybody untrained to reach the stage at which they are proof against disturbance. This needs hard work, and demands especially two things. The first of these is physical seclusion; the second, an ability to throw out ideas wandering into the mind, so that one ‘does not scatter oneself and get sold into multiplicity’, as he rather nicely puts it. He stresses that to still the mind one must still the body too.  http://www.eckhartsociety.org/eckhart/his-teachings